


Improbable

by choomchoom



Series: Endings & Beginnings [2]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Canon-Typical Violence, Epistolary, M/M, they just talk about their feelings for ten thousand words. i don't even know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-17 18:18:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18103865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: What had he wanted Starscream to say? That he had found Prowl’s methods and priorities delightful ever since Prowl had started snooping around the Decepticons for Optimus a few years ago? That he’d had imagined conversations with Prowl in his head about an embarrassing range of topics for almost as long? If Starscream were the kind of person who said those sorts of things out loud, he wouldn’t have been the person Prowl had chosen to text his thoughts, opinions, dry wit, and knowledge to for all these months. He had a reputation to uphold.-Human AU in the same universe as On the Drive Home; this installment should be understandable in isolation, but the previous fic will provide context for a lot of the background events.





	Improbable

**Author's Note:**

> The thing you have to understand about Improbable is that it takes place in an alternate universe where the events of the fic make sense. It is a human AU taking place in a world that works vaguely like our world, but the minutia of academia and politics and public service are not necessarily accurately depicted – the versions of these institutions that appear in the fic exist only to serve the overall narrative of the story. If that is something that would bother you, I recommend that you step away from this fic. 
> 
> The violence referenced in the tags can be more accurately described as domestic/partner violence. More information can be found in the end notes.

Working at the Institute was the worst idea that Prowl had ever had.

Working at the Institute was the best idea Prowl had ever had.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?” Bumblebee had asked him when he’d heard. He’d pulled Prowl aside after Seminar, and his voice had been low and serious.

“Not your business,” Prowl had responded.

Bumblebee’s face had gone from grave to thoughtful. “Is this an Optimus thing?”

Prowl had shrugged Bee’s arm off and started walking, changing the subject when Bee caught up to him.

Let him keep thinking that. Let him think he was _so_ clever for figuring it out.

He’d only gotten himself accepted through an excruciating interview where the Director had asked him in only the most oblique terms if he was okay with the corruption that the Institute held, and Prowl had told him in just as vague terms that yes, he was. The Institute, despite being the nonprofit that worked most closely with the city government, had never had an MCDP intern before. The Director had made sure Prowl understood why.

Prowl had recorded the interview, hoping that it would give him all the proof that he needed to go forward with some plan, still being formulated, to _stop_ it. But all the language had been coded, deniable.

So Prowl had actually had to accept.

Optimus thought he was interning with an LGBTQ youth center whose director had been replaced since Optimus had left the city, whose number Optimus wouldn’t have in his contacts. He wouldn’t give Optimus a reason to suspect what he was doing, because that would only ruin it. Optimus had always disapproved of anything underhanded, anything that couldn’t be done in the light of day.

Optimus had never understood that some things that had to be done _could not be done in the light of day._

So Prowl went to his internship. He catalogued papers and wrote drafts of grants and recorded everything he could, which wasn’t much. Not yet.

It was the middle of October when the email came. _from a concerned citizen_ was the subject line, and the return address was a keysmash at a publicly available domain.

 _If you’re not an idiot, and you have any interest whatsoever in doing the right thing, I think we could be resources for each other_ , the email had said. At the bottom was listed a phone number. 

Prowl would ordinarily have deleted it and moved on with his life. But something about the language in the email intrigued him. _Be resources for each other_. It was the kind of thing he wouldn’t have _said_ to a fellow human being, but it was certainly the kind of thing he _thought_. This “concerned citizen”, whoever they may be, was, in some identifiable way, on his wavelength.

Prowl texted them, filing the number into his phone as _citizen_. They did exchange information, tentatively at first, and later with paragraphs of their own analyses of what they’d found.

But they didn’t just exchange information. They also – eurgh – _talked_.

Citizen had good ideas, was the thing. He was articulate and insightful and _funny_. Prowl hadn’t often had people in his life who he enjoyed talking to, just for the sake of talking. But Citizen thought like him. Citizen believed in the same ideals and tactics as Prowl did, and was able to articulate why in a way that Prowl wished that he could do himself.

It was obvious that Citizen had been previously involved in the local sociopolitical activism scene – his opinions on the Institute went back _years_ , nobody got that angry about the first revelation (since covered up) that the Institute was siphoning money from _real_ social programs unless they had been following the story closely three years ago. Prowl was certain from the second day that Citizen had been involved with the Decepticons, and he only grew surer as their conversations developed.

Optimus had hated the Decepticons. But Optimus would hate everything Prowl was doing, if he knew about it. There was no logical reason why someone whose organization had clashed with Optimus years ago couldn’t be an ally now.

 _It’s very interesting that they keep paper records,_ Citizen had said. It had been five minutes, and Prowl was still staring at the text, trying to deduce what kind of response Citizen was looking for.

 _It’s very interesting_ was a nothing phrase – it offered no insight on what Citizen wanted to _do_ with this information, if anything.

It was January. It had been nearly six months since Prowl had first interviewed at the Institute, and he’d had no success in getting any concrete information about their illegal and unethical manipulation of the city’s nonprofit grant distribution. He was given busywork, sure, but he was still shut out of meetings and the doors were all soundproofed.

Then on Monday, a janitor who Prowl recognized from around the building that housed the Institute had flagged him down. He had told Prowl that the main archivist for the Institute had left a box of files on the floor in the basement records room, and he needed someone from the organization to file it properly so he could clean the space.

 “I can clean it up,” Prowl had said. “I don’t have a key to get in, though – could I borrow yours for an hour?”

And the janitor had handed it to him. 

Prowl had filed the manila envelopes in their proper places – it was the same organizational system as the upstairs records room, where Prowl had worked on filing every Monday morning for months. But it was shelves and shelves of papers he hadn’t seen before.

He’d had an hour. He hadn’t had time to look through it all.

But he’d had time to sneak across the street to the locksmith and have the key copied.

He hadn’t made up his mind on what to do with it. There was so much information in that records room, but Prowl still didn’t know if it was what he was looking for. It was too risky to look himself, because if he was caught snooping without finding anything useful, he would be fired and all of this would be for nothing.

But Citizen didn’t work for the Institute. (Probably. Prowl had put the odds that he was an Institute plant meant to spy on Prowl at 75% when he’d received the first email, and now he was down below 10%. Either way, Prowl had said enough on their text string by now that the Institute could have quietly fired him months ago – they certainly didn’t need another PR disaster, not after three years ago. He’d proven well and truly to Citizen that the Institute shouldn’t trust him).

Anyway. The text had been sitting in Prowl’s phone for eight minutes.

 _Also very interesting how there's a key to the room taped beneath the bottom step up to the building_.

He sent it. It was Citizen’s turn.

-

Three nights after Prowl had last texted Citizen, two and a half days after he’d taped the key to the steps of the Institute while on a break-of-dawn jog, and five hours after he’d seen fucking _Starscream_ staking out the entrance to the Institute as Prowl had left for the evening, Prowl’s phone started going off a few minutes after midnight.

He almost didn’t check it. Whatever his Development II presentation group wanted could wait until morning.

But it wasn’t the sporadic activity of an active group text. It was a steady _bzz, bzz, bzz, bzz,_ as if someone was typing one word and hitting send, over and over again.

Prowl assumed that it was some absurd prank of Rodimus’s as he blearily picked up the phone, intending to simply shut it off for the night. But when he saw the contents of the texts, he was immediately wide awake.

Images. Documents, one after another, sometimes what was obviously a double of the same sheet if the first one was blurry. It looked like the pictures were being taken on a staircase.

Coming from Citizen’s number.

Prowl wished for once that he wasn’t capable of putting together the pieces. He didn’t want to have noticed Starscream leaning against a tree across the street, lounging casually near a bus stop with a cigarette in his hand, everything about his presentation carefully calculated so that people would overlook him. The passion and clarity with which Citizen had described their politics; the way Prowl had noticed that those politics deviated just slightly from Megatron’s.

Slightly, but probably substantially enough to justify the infamous feud between Megatron and his second, which anyone with an ear to the ground knew about.

From the facts in front of him, Prowl couldn’t unreservedly say that Citizen was Starscream. But…he knew. He just knew.

He was trying to decide whether to feel angry at Starscream for talking to him so intimately all this time under false pretenses, or at himself for not perceiving it sooner when the images stopped coming. Citizen – _Starscream_ , ugh – typed for a moment, and then a text popped up.

_Just in case._

Just in case? What in the hell was that supposed to mean?

Having already been blindsided by one revelation in the last five minutes, Prowl was stymied for a second, staring at it. Then his brain kicked on and he started to think.

It meant that Starscream wasn’t sure that he would be able to act on this information himself. And it meant that he believed that whatever might prevent him from doing so was an urgent enough matter that he had to text Prowl about it in the middle of the night.

Prowl had gotten lots of intelligence on Starscream when Optimus had been around. He’d had Decepticons that he chatted with, the ones who liked to hear themselves talk. He’d found hidden places to listen in on public meetings, snuck one of his email addresses onto one of their unattended sign-in sheets. So Prowl knew a few things about Starscream – most relevantly, he knew that Starscream was proud. He wouldn’t have involved Prowl in this if he could take all the credit himself instead.

So why _just in case_? What was he afraid of?

Megatron seemed like the obvious answer. Megatron, it had seemed, before it had all gone to hell, was the only obstacle preventing Starscream from taking over the Decepticons. None of the other big players seemed like they would be any kind of threat to him.

Starscream had hit Rodimus’s car last month. 

Prowl wasn’t sure why that fact had surfaced in his mind, but he followed the thread. Right – Rodimus had been on his way to pick up Drift, and Starscream had t-boned his car.

This made sense, because at the time, _Drift had lived with Starscream_.

Megatron would be living there too. Where else would he have gone? He didn’t have a place of his own, or any money or family. He and Starscream antagonized each other, but they’d also worked closely as allies for years.

Prowl closed his messaging app and called Rodimus.

“H’llo?” Obviously he’d been sleeping.

“Put Drift on,” Prowl said. As he spoke, he threw off his blankets and held the phone to his ear with his shoulder while he changed out of pajama pants.

“Why do you want to talk to Drift?” Rodimus asked, articulating a little better now. Prowl heard more sleepy mumbles in the background.

“Put Drift on the phone _right now_.”

“What’s going on?” While Rodimus had sounded bamboozled by the situation, Drift was alert the way people _should_ be at an unexpected midnight phone call.

“I need your old address,” Prowl said.

“I’m going to need more than that.” On Drift’s end, Prowl could hear Rodimus saying something unintelligible.

How much to tell him? Prowl didn’t trust Drift. He had been one of those Decepticons who had latched onto Megatron’s eloquence about the cause as a remedy for never having felt purpose in life before, and now as far as Prowl knew he hadn’t changed except to turn that attention toward Rodimus.

As unimpressed as Prowl was with Drift personally, he would be a fool not to take advantage of Drift’s experience here. “I’ve been texting back and forth with Starscream,” he admitted. “ _Don’t ask_. I just got a message implying that he might be in danger. Should I be concerned?”

Drift’s initial response was a frustrated sigh that Prowl interpreted as the _yes_ that he’d needed in order to slam his feet into boots and walk out of his first-floor apartment. “You think he’s at home?” Drift asked, putting together the information from Prowl’s initial demand and the explanation that he had requested. He was easier to have a conversation with than Rodimus, at least.

“Yes,” Prowl said. The staircase could have been anywhere – except for the building that housed the Institute, because in that case Prowl would have recognized it – but why would Starscream have taken the pictures there if he wasn’t about to walk into an unsafe situation?

“It’s 113 Fourth Street,” Drift said. “Don’t go in alone, okay? I’ll meet you there.”

Drift hung up before Prowl had a chance to respond. He put the address into his Maps app as he made his way to his car.

-

113 Fourth Street was about what Prowl expected. It was a narrow house with an overgrown yard, with light shining through holes in the curtains over the second-floor windows. As soon as he parked, a familiar red car pulled up behind him.

Rodimus and Drift caught up with him in the middle of the empty street. By the time they reached the sidewalk on the other side Prowl could hear yelling.

Drift lifted a corner of the doormat and grabbed a key from underneath it – of course the Decepticons’ movement had failed if all of them were _this stupid_. He unlocked the front door and replaced the key, which Prowl considered trying to steal on principle.

More important things to worry about right now. The first floor was dark and mostly closed off from the entrance. Drift led the way up the darkened stairs to the second floor.

Scuffed wood with white flecks of paint drips. Yes, these stairs. 

Nobody was yelling now. But as they ascended, a familiar voice became apparent. Speaking at regular volume, quieter than Prowl had ever heard him speak.

“You think that this is a game? That you can just _try things_ until one of them catches my attention? The Decepticons are over, Starscream. Yes, the world is still unfair. That’s because we _lost_ , not because I didn’t fight hard enough!” 

Megatron was shouting by the end of it, and Prowl cringed at the sound of a body hitting a wall, or maybe the floor, as he reached the top of the stairs.

The second floor was chaos. There were documents scattered all over the half of the living space nearest the stairs, many torn or crumpled. A coffee table in front of the room’s one couch had been overturned, spilling coasters and empty glasses onto the floor.

Megatron was in one corner, standing. He was wearing his hair cropped short now, a contrast from the shoulder-length mane he’s had back in his glory days.

At his feet was Starscream, curled up and wheezing on the floor. Starscream was clutching his neck and had the beginnings of swelling on his face; Megatron’s sleeves were bunched up over a set of red scratches on his forearms, some leaking blood.

“Get away from him,” Drift said, voice flatter and more serious than Prowl had ever heard it. 

Megatron whirled on him. “ _You_ have made it _abundantly_ clear that our arguments are none of your business.”

“Your arguments became my business on August 13th of last year,” Drift said. He crossed his arms. It was a _terrible_ defensive position – almost as if he was baiting Megatron to hit him.

Megatron turned to glare at Starscream again. “This isn’t over,” he snarled, then he walked through an open door that led out to the room they were in and slammed it.

Next to Prowl, Rodimus had a hand on Drift’s shoulder, easing Drift’s suddenly shaking hands out of their vice grip on his upper arms. Somehow, logic dictated that it was now Prowl’s responsibility to check on Starscream.

He seemed to be breathing better, as Prowl approached, but he hadn’t made any move to rise from his position on the floor and was still coughing once every few breaths.

Prowl knelt next to him and stalled out.

How did people start conversations like this? _We’ve never met, but you know me better than anyone ever really has_ was right out, as was _are you okay_ which had too obvious of an answer to be worth asking.

In the end, Starscream saved him. “When did you figure it out?” he asked, wincing and coughing again once he’d finished speaking.

“When you texted me just now,” Prowl said, brain still in too much tumult to be anything but honest.

Starscream started to laugh at that. The quiet laughter, and looking down at Starscream – hurt and vulnerable and oddly, he realized, open – did something in Prowl’s chest.

Drift saved him from having to address it. Prowl heard footsteps behind him and turned to look at Drift and Rodimus, who had finally quit canoodling.

“Options,” Drift said. “One: you can stay here. Two: we find you another place to sleep tonight.”

“ _What_?” Prowl asked. “We need to call the police.”

“What the fuck, Prowl,” Starscream deadpanned. He was finally pulling himself up from the floor to sit against the wall, a movement that he finished before Prowl had completed his internal debate on whether to help.

Prowl knew the Decepticons’ feelings on police, but Drift didn’t know exactly what Starscream had said to Prowl. _What did you think was going to happen_? he wanted to ask, but maybe not with so much of an audience here.

“You should at least see a doctor,” Prowl said, understanding that he was going to get nowhere on the _people shouldn’t be allowed to just get away with domestic violence_ front.

“I don’t need to see a doctor,” Starscream said, wincing with the effort that speaking took.

Drift rolled his eyes. Rodimus, behind him, looked vaguely sick. “Compromise: we can have Ratchet check you out,” Drift said.

“He knows Ratchet?” Rodimus asked Drift.

“ _You_ know Ratchet?” Starscream lobbed back. 

“Ratchet worked as a protest medic when the Decepticons were first forming and he’s a fourth-year medical student and Drift’s roommate now,” Prowl explained, because getting all that information into the open would have taken the rest of the people in this room five damn minutes.

“Ratchet wouldn’t be willing to –”

“He will,” Drift said. “And if that’s your only protest, we’re going.”

Starscream was sullenly silent at that, and Prowl had decided by now that he should help him up off the floor. Starscream grasped his extended hand and levered himself to his feet.

“Address?” Prowl asked Drift quietly once they’d shut the front door behind them.

Drift gave it to him, and Prowl put it into his phone as he walked toward his car.

Surprisingly, Starscream followed him, hands tucked deep in the pockets of his black sweatshirt. Prowl had expected him to go with Drift, who he’d known better and for longer and who actually knew where he was driving, and when Starscream opened Prowl’s passenger door and got in, it felt like a weird sort of victory.

Prowl ended up mostly following Rodimus to Drift’s place. There were barely any cars on the road at this hour, and most of the lights they encountered were flashing yellow and red.

And now they had no audience. “When you sent me that text, what did you think was going to happen?” Prowl asked, unable to think of anything else until he had the answer to that question in hand.

“That doesn’t matter now,” said Starscream.

- 

Getting out of Prowl’s car was an ordeal. The ten-minute drive had given Starscream’s injuries time to settle in and really start to hurt, unmitigated by the distraction and adrenaline of the situation where he’d gotten them.

And his body was very much not in favor of moving again.

Prowl was watching him from the sidewalk, expression unreadable, as Starscream maneuvered himself out of the passenger seat. Drift and Rodimus were further up the sidewalk, hovering near Rodimus’s ridiculous excuse for a car.

Ratchet opened the door as they were approaching. Drift must have called ahead. Ratchet looked different than Starscream remembered – mostly older. His hair was shorter now, and all his tattoos fit under a gray long-sleeved shirt. There were new wrinkles around his eyes and a ring of stubble that didn’t suit him on his chin.

He nodded to Drift and gestured for the rest of them to follow him inside. It was warm in the apartment, warmer than Starscream could afford to keep his house. These assholes probably didn’t have to deal with electric heat.

Ratchet led him into a modest dining area shoved into an alcove, going so far as to pull out one of the scratched wooden chairs. Starscream took a seat gingerly, his chest and back protesting the motion, and the corners of Ratchet’s lips turned down.

Ignoring the discomfort, Starscream looped an arm around the back of the chair and stretched his legs in front of him, crossing his ankles. A casual posture, definitely a posture that someone who needed to see a real doctor wouldn’t take.

“Can all of you go somewhere else?” Ratchet asked, pulling up a second chair in front of Starscream. Drift nodded and led Rodimus and Prowl to one of the bedrooms. Starscream recognized Drift’s bedspread before he shut the door behind them.

Ratchet met Starscream’s eyes. “What happened?” he asked.

“Fell down some stairs.”

Ratchet shot him an unimpressed glare, which he quickly replaced with a professional mask. He stretched his legs out in front of him and leaned back in his chair, mimicking Starscream’s posture. “I’m just going to sit here until you tell me the truth.”

Starscream could definitely outlast him. No one had yet managed to outmatch Starscream for stubbornness. Starscream could get out his phone and…shit, his phone was back at the house.

Starscream could definitely outlast him. But Starscream was tired, and it just wasn’t worth it.

“Someone slammed me into a wall a few times – and the floor – hit me with a closed fist, and – um.” Starscream’s throat seemed to close up as he thought back to Megatron’s thumb digging into his airway. Instead of saying it out loud, he made a vague motion with his hand, and hoped that Ratchet was smart enough to put it together with the redness and swelling that was probably there.

“Okay,” Ratchet said. “I can work with that.” Starscream heard him shift and opened his eyes, which he hadn’t realized he’d closed. “I need you to take your shirt off,” Ratchet said. “Just for a second, so I can check for broken ribs.”

That was a struggle, but Starscream managed. Ratchet did a cursory check of his ribs, then had him put the shirt back on. He got out an honest-to-fuck stethoscope and listened to Starscream breathe, and then sat back.

“I think you’re okay,” he said. “Physically, I mean. Nothing’s broken, and if anything else is wrong – which is unlikely – it wouldn’t be detectable right away. You should probably lay low tomorrow, at the very least.” He paused, eyes fixed somewhere to the left of Starscream’s face. “You really want me to pretend that I don’t know what happened here?”

For a second, Starscream thought that Drift must have ratted him out. Then he realized that the combination of what he said and who he’d shown up here with probably made it obvious.

Either way, “You have no idea what happened.”

Ratchet hid his disappointment by turning to his phone, which was on the table, looking something up on it, and then starting to write on a post-it pad. “Well, I’d be remiss in my professional obligations if I didn’t give you this,” Ratchet said, tearing off the top post-it and handing it to Starscream. The post-it had an 800 number on it. “It’s a local domestic violence hotline.”

“I don’t –”

“Please just keep it. Please. You can throw it away as soon as you get out of here,” Ratchet said. He turned away and walked toward Drift’s room.

Starscream pocketed the note. Easier than arguing. He was back to lounging by the time the whole crowd was making their way back toward him.

Prowl marched up to him first. “You can stay on my couch tonight.”

Hm. That was loaded. Starscream suspected that Prowl wanted to have a Conversation, or several, like the brief one in the car. He kind of rather wouldn’t.

But Prowl hadn’t phrased it as a question. And Starscream appreciated that enough that he wasn’t inclined to argue.

Starscream nodded and watched Drift’s shoulders deflate. “One problem,” he said, pausing just so he could watch Drift tense up like a wire again. “I left my phone at home. The good fake doctor here –” Ratchet kept his reaction to that to an eyeroll “ – told me to lie low, so I’ll need it to call out of work tomorrow.”

“You have a job?” Rodimus asked.

Starscream rolled his eyes so hard it _hurt_. “I have two jobs, but I’ll have zero if I skip out on them without notice tomorrow.”

“I’ll text Soundwave,” Drift said. “Rodimus and I will go pick it up. Anything else you need?”

Starscream could think of several things, but he just shook his head. In all likelihood he’d be back tomorrow evening, once Megatron had cooled off, and when Prowl brought the papers forward it would look like he was the only one involved. The Institute would finally, _finally_ be back in hot water, and everything else would go back to normal.

-

Rodimus watched Drift hunch in on himself the second they were alone in the car. He curled his hands into fists and pressed them against his eyes.

Rodimus started the car, because it was _cold_ , but didn’t go anywhere yet. Partially because even though he’d just come from there, he needed directions back to Drift’s old house.

“This is turning out to be a heck of a night,” he said, not sure how else to start a conversation.

Drift chuckled at that. “We have class at eight,” he said, looking at the clock on the dashboard. Rodimus took his eyes off Drift for a moment to glance at it – it was just after two in the morning.

“How are you doing?” Rodimus asked.

“I don’t know,” Drift said, now looking out the window instead of at the clock. “Go straight in this direction til the first light, then turn left.”

Rodimus obeyed.

“I’m kind of glad this is all happening,” Drift said. “But I also kind of wish that it wasn’t? That it didn’t have to? That this whole situation had just never turned out like this.”

Rodimus had a good guess as to what Drift meant by _this whole situation_ , but that was all. “Can I ask you something?”

“Always.”

“What happened last year? I mean, I know a lot of things happened last year. But I meant that date you mentioned to Megatron – what was that?”

“Turn right at the stop sign. I’m not going to talk about that while you’re driving. I’ll tell you, just – later.”

“Okay,” Rodimus said, pulling onto an all too familiar street. He wondered if there wasn’t still some bits of ground-up glass and metal on the ground here from the accident. He hadn’t been back here at night since then.

This time, he pulled up in front of Drift’s old house safely. Soundwave was already standing out front, smoking a cigarette. “Want me to come with you?” Rodimus asked.

“Yes.”  

They both got out of the car, Rodimus stuffing his hands in his sweatshirt pockets as he followed Drift to where Soundwave waited on the other side of the street.

“Are you and the kids going to be safe?” Drift asked, as Soundwave reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone with a black case and a charging cable.

“We will be fine,” Soundwave said. Rodimus had never heard him speak before – he’d handled PR for the Decepticons quietly from the background, and he turned out to have a low, carefully enunciated voice that made Rodimus immediately want to trust him.

Drift moved to take the phone, but Soundwave kept his grip on it, leaving the two of them in a weird approximation of a handshake. “None of us makes our work unsalvageable,” Soundwave said, looking Drift right in the eye.

Drift returned his gaze to the phone and yanked it out of Soundwave’s hand. He took a step back and pocketed it. “I disagree,” Drift said. “It’s over. It’s time for us all to get over it.”

“You haven’t,” Soundwave said. “You’re still fighting.”

Drift looked away from both Soundwave and Rodimus. “Not really.”

“No, you are,” Soundwave said. “If you’d given up like you say you have, you would be in some dead-end job like Starscream minus the scheming. You wouldn’t be working as hard as I know you are.”

“None of that matters,” Drift said. “I’m not a Decepticon anymore. Whatever they are these days, I don’t want to be a part of it. There are better ways to do things.”

“I know that there are better ways,” Soundwave said. “But I don’t want to renounce the name Decepticon to do them.”

“What do you have in mind?” Drift asked, finally looking back up at Soundwave.

“A home,” Soundwave said. “I spoke to Starscream after Ravage moved in, and I’m going to be keeping the house after the original lease is up. I’m going to turn it into something new. A microcosm of the world we dream of.”

 “That sounds…really great, actually,” Drift said, shuffling his feet. “I hope it works out. I really do.”

“And I hope that whatever path you’re on works out as well,” Soundwave said. He shifted his cigarette to his left hand and held out his right. Drift, to Rodimus’s surprise, shook it.

Then Soundwave was holding his hand out to Rodimus. Out of sheer muscle memory, Rodimus grasped it. Soundwave tightened his grip. “Be good to him,” Soundwave said. “Whether he thinks so or not, he’s one of us, and I watch out for him.”

All Rodimus could do at that was nod, which was apparently enough for Soundwave. He released Rodimus’s hand and slouched back against the wall.

“Thanks,” Drift said, after he’d half-turned back towards the car. “For the – just, thanks.”

Soundwave only nodded, and Rodimus was relieved to follow Drift back to the car.

-

“Do you have a plan for what to do next?”

Starscream tried to look over at Prowl without moving his neck, which didn’t really work. Prowl’s body language turned out to be inscrutable anyway, shoulders slightly hiked up and face blank as he concentrated on the road.

If it was Drift asking, he would have said _sleep_ , as obnoxiously as possible. Drift would have been asking about his plans for the far future – he always made strict, unbendable plans, thinking too far ahead for his own good.

If it was Megatron asking – heh. Megatron would never have asked him a question like that. Or, if he did, he would have taken any answer or non-answer Starscream gave him and used it as a launching pad for a shiny new tirade about Starscream’s choices.

But this was Prowl. Prowl didn’t give a shit about his living situation. And unlike Megatron, he actually seemed to ask Starscream questions because he was curious about Starscream’s response.

Prowl was asking about the papers.

“There are two routes we could take, really,” Starscream said. “Media, or legal. Both at once would be tricky, and has the potential to be thrown back in our faces, if the Institute mobilizes well. I’ll need more time with what we have to figure out if it’s shocking enough that people will be enraged about it without commentary. That’s certainly the simplest version of this.”

“People are primed to be enraged,” Prowl said. “But they’re also scared. And they feel helpless. I think, to leverage the media side of things, we’ll need to manufacture a win for the local embittered revolutionaries beforehand. Do you think you got out clean?”

“Yes,” Starscream said. Soundwave would probably kill him when he’d found out that Starscream had borrowed Rumble and Frenzy to keep lookout and copy documents that Starscream found interesting, but it had been a decent enough team for what he’d been trying to accomplish. They’d replaced the original documents and locked the door behind them.

Prowl just nodded once at that, then pulled into a driveway that emerged into a parking lot between two buildings. He parked in a numbered spot and stopped the car.

“Did you have a win in mind?” Starscream asked, just because he was curious. This, talking to Prowl, was so much more his style than talking to Megatron had _ever_ been. He would stay in this car for the rest of the night to continue this conversation, maybe if talking hurt less.

“Give me a day,” Prowl said. “This won’t be for nothing.”

Megatron would have said something like _you have my word_ after that sentence, but Prowl just left it as it was. No drama, no self-importance, just statement of what he was going to make fact. “Good,” Starscream said, and got out of the car.

-

Prowl’s apartment was exactly what Starscream would have expected of him, if he’d ever bothered to think about it. The walls were white and bare, and the furniture was sparse and utilitarian. There was no TV, but a computer took up most of a desk in the corner of the main room. Against the opposite wall was a couch, and a linoleum countertop separated off a small kitchen. Two doors marked the other side of the apartment, one open to a shoebox-sized bathroom, the other closed. It was impeccably, irritatingly neat.

Prowl flicked on a light switch and crossed to the door that Starscream assumed led to the bedroom. “There are linens for the couch. Just a moment,” he said, and shut the door behind him.

Starscream, for lack of anything interesting to look at in this place, took a seat on the couch. He immediately regretted it, realizing that he was going to have to get back up before he could sleep on the surprisingly soft cushions.

Prowl came out of his room a few minutes later, and Starscream opened his eyes, trying to pretend that he hadn’t been dozing off a little, tiny bit. He used the arm of the couch to lever himself to his feet and turned to face Prowl.

“I have one question,” Prowl said. “And it’s not _important_ , so you don’t have to answer it right now _._ I just…have to know. Why did you email me in the first place?”

“Because I was baffled by your decision-making and wanted to see if I was right about a hunch,” Starscream replied. “I was right – you were working against the Institute. Being right is an excellent feeling. I highly recommend it.”

“Oh,” Prowl said, the emotion in his voice so conflicted or modulated that Starscream couldn’t read anything from it. What had he wanted Starscream to say? That he had found Prowl’s methods and priorities delightful ever since Prowl had started snooping around the Decepticons for Optimus a few years ago? That he’d had imagined conversations with Prowl in his head about an embarrassing range of topics for almost as long? If Starscream were the kind of person who said those sorts of things out loud, he wouldn’t have been the person Prowl had chosen to text his thoughts, opinions, dry wit, and knowledge to for all these months. He had a reputation to uphold.

“Satisfy my curiosity,” Starscream said. “Why did you reply?”

He watched from the back as Prowl’s shoulders tensed slightly. Before Prowl had a chance to respond, there was a knock at the door.

Starscream was on high alert instantly. It wasn’t impossible that Megatron could have tracked him down by now – Drift knew where he was, and Ratchet, and Megatron had access to Starscream’s phone –

Oh. His phone. Drift and Rodimus were coming with his phone. Starscream tried to slow his racing heart, but couldn’t resist looking through the peephole before yanking the door open.

It was just Drift on the other side, hands stuffed in the pockets of his not at all weather-appropriate sweatshirt. “Hey,” he said, when he saw Starscream on the other side of the door.

“Hello,” said Starscream.

“I’ve got this,” Drift said, pulling out Starscream’s phone – and charger, thank fuck.

Starscream took the offered phone and cable. Drift didn’t leave, shifting from foot to foot.

“I talked to Soundwave,” he said, not looking at Starscream. “He wants to start a Decepticon hippie commune.”

Starscream snorted, tried to quell the bolt of defensiveness that had shot through him at Drift’s first sentence. “Of course he does.”

“I think it might work,” Drift said. “It’s not for me, but…we had some good people. A lot of good people. I think he can do it.”

“That’s nice,” Starscream said, too tired to make it sound as sarcastic as he would have liked to.

“What I mean to say is – I don’t hate you for trying. I never should have.”

“Sounds like he’s trying to build something,” Starscream said. “I’m trying to tear something down.”

“Well.” Drift stopped.

“I know. Megatron would have said that we need to do both.”

Drift didn’t move for a beat, then, annoyingly, smiled. “All the best, Starscream,” he said. “We all could have done better before. And we can all do better now.”

He turned to walk away, and Starscream almost shut the door after him. But some instinct led him to swing it back open.

“Thanks,” he called down the hallway.

Drift turned around and smiled again. Starscream regretted all of his choices and shut the door.

-

“I’ll run up, I don’t think you’re supposed to park here.”

“Okay.” Rodimus had stopped in a random spot behind Prowl’s building, which he’d somehow never been to before. He knew that Prowl and Bee had been roommates and Prowl had insisted on getting his own place for second year, opening up his old room in Rodimus’s current apartment. Despite being…co-mentees, or whatever being on Optimus’s weird lingering team was, Rodimus and Prowl weren’t actually friends.

“Back in a minute,” Drift said, practically bouncing out of the car and closing the door a little harder than normal behind him.

Rodimus spent the time alone in the car ruminating on whether he should ask again about what Drift had said to Megatron or leave it be. Drift was back in a few minutes, buckling his seatbelt and slumping back in his seat in one motion. “Back to yours?”

“Sure,” Rodimus said. He looked at the clock; they’d been out for almost three hours. “I’m not going to class tomorrow. I won’t do it. You can’t make me.”

“Trust me, I have no intention of trying,” Drift said. He curled his hands into fists and pressed his knuckles to his eyes. “Fuck. What a night. I’m glad we’re finally going home.” He jerked his head up, as if he’d said something wrong. “Sorry, your home.”

“Don’t be like that,” Rodimus said. “Me too.”

Rodimus watched Drift relax back into his seat by increments, until he pulled into the parking lot for his own building. They made their way through the complex in silence, and neither spoke until they were safe in Rodimus’s room, across the whole apartment from where Bumblebee slept, probably unaware that anything had happened.

“I promised you an answer to your question,” Drift said once he was stretched out on Rodimus’s bed, once again in pajama pants and a soft Henley.

“We don’t have to do this right now,” Rodimus said.

“I’d rather not do this ever, but I’m so tired that I don’t think I can really feel anything and I do want you to know,” Drift said, half with his face mashed into his pillow. “Last year. August 13th.”

Rodimus sat next to Drift on the bed, turning off the room’s bright main light which left them illuminated only by the more pleasant lamp on the bedside table. Rodimus crossed his ankles and leaned against the headboard, looking down at Drift who had turned to face the ceiling, laying down with his arms crossed. He didn’t meet Rodimus’s eyes. “That was the day Megatron got out of jail. I – we all knew he’d be staying with us, he’d lost his old place between the arrest and the legal bills.” Drift squeezed his eyes shut and then pressed his hands against them. Rodimus ached to touch him, but didn’t dare. “It was fine for a few hours. Rumble and Frenzy were asking him all kinds of questions and Megatron was being a good sport about it. I was gearing up to break the news that I’d quit. For a good ten minutes there I thought he might take it well.” Drift choked out a bitter laugh. “Then Starscream got home. They went into his room and – Soundwave and I had rooms downstairs, so we vacated to give them some privacy. Then – they fought. I don’t know how long it lasted, and I didn’t have any way to tune it out. The noises.” Drift stopped for a second and swallowed, breathing fast. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to _think_. Megatron was yelling, but Starscream yelled right back. The only difference was that sometimes Starscream’s voice would cut off and something would crash against the floor. That whole time, I wanted to think that it was something different than what it was. Throwing things. Stomping. I don’t know.”

“Drift,” Rodimus said, softly as he could, not even sure what he should follow it up with.

“I still don’t know if that was normal,” Drift went on. “I mean, it definitely wasn’t normal. But I don’t know if that was the first time. Things were definitely worse after Megatron got back but…I don’t know what their normal was. I don’t know how it happened, who started it, why both of them kept at it. Anyway. Fuck. That night, I ended up driving Starscream to the hospital. It was really obvious what had happened, but he refused to tell anyone about it. Even me. I tried to talk to him. I said whatever I could think of that might keep it from happening again. It didn’t work. After that night, Starscream went full-on pretend-Drift-doesn’t-exist. I didn’t know what to do.”

“You helped,” Rodimus said. “You helped where he let you. It’s not your fault that you couldn’t change things. It’s not your fault that any of this happened.”

Finally, finally, Drift reached for Rodimus. Rodimus shifted to Drift’s level, wrapped his arms around him, and held on.

-

Starscream glared at the closed door for a moment before turning his attention back to Prowl.

“It was because from your phrasing, I thought that you might have something I could use,” Prowl said from behind him – where he had probably heard that whole ridiculous conversation, blast him. “I also enjoy being right. Couch is ready.”

Starscream wondered if Prowl thought that everything from that first email to the to the dozens of texts a day to the heist to the pictures had been one giant scheme to bring him here, to Prowl’s apartment, tonight. He hoped that Prowl thought so. He wondered if maybe it had been, if he’d angled himself toward this without ever really believing that it could happen.

Starscream wasn’t sure what to say to Prowl. He didn’t dare thank him. “Okay.”

“I have to be on campus early, so I’ll probably be gone when you get up,” Prowl said. “There’s a spare key in the drawer next to the stove if you want to leave and come back.”

Starscream raised his eyebrows – it was shocking, to say the least, that Prowl would trust him with something like that.

“The bedroom door locks,” Prowl continued by way of explanation. “I’ll be back around 5:30. It would be okay if you’re still here. Actually, it would be okay if you stayed longer. I don’t want you to feel like you don’t have options.”

“Hm,” said Starscream, trying to contain his surprise this time. He didn’t have options. He never had. But – it was like Drift had been alluding to. Things could change.

-

The next day, Prowl pulled at a string that he’d had in hand for months. He brought down Judge Tyrest.

Tyrest had been a judge in the county’s court for longer than Prowl and his contemporaries had been alive, and for much of that time, he’d been respected for being fair and vocal about holding the best interests of the community in his work. Five years ago, he had nearly retired, but come back immediately due to a hasty and significant pay raise.

He was a public employee. That pay raise should have been voted on by the city council at least, but it wasn’t. One day, it just existed. Prowl had known about this since his first semester of MCDP, when he’d still been thinking about going into public policy. (He’d since decided that he would definitely not be going into public policy, but he was no longer sure where he wanted to be. He’d gone into the internship at the Institute knowing full well that there would be nothing left for him here once he made his move against them. As far as he was concerned, the world ended after this project. Graduation was like a cliff he was being pushed toward, knowing that there was no place to safely land once he dropped off it).

He’d researched Tyrest as a pet project, because he was bored and wanted backup plans in case Optimus’s plans hadn’t panned out (which, shocker, they hadn’t). After finding out the salary thing, Prowl had looked into Tyrest’s cases. The ratios of convictions as compared to the previous twenty years were shocking. He’d stopped making public statements and appearances, and since he’d made a big show of retiring, the public had assumed he was no longer relevant. There was no one checking him except his fellow judges, most of whom he had mentored and selected for their current positions, and whoever was feeding him his new paycheck.

It was probably the Institute, but it would certainly be impossible to trace back to them. Tyrest would fall alone, leaving them none the wiser – maybe even distracting them from the possibility that something had happened in their own building last night.

He contacted the City Council first, taking a page from Starscream’s playbook and doing so as an anonymous citizen. One of the council members called him (on his burner, of course) immediately, and Prowl directed them to the information he’d found in the first place – all freely available online, some of it on the city’s website. “I’ll call you back,” the council member had said eventually, sounding as if his world was crashing down around his shoulders.

“Don’t bother,” Prowl said, and hung up.

Two hours later, he released the same information to the far-left Facebook groups, all compiled in a PDF for easy absorption. Someone started planning a protest for four hours from then. Prowl had made sure to get a permit for it first thing, and he had one of his old contacts from the Decepticons pretend to have very speedily acquired it. The City Council’s Twitter and Facebook pages, and probably emails and phones, started getting bombarded with questions.

And Prowl had never left his desk in the upstairs archives of the Institute building.

Tyrest had stepped down by the end of the day. The people who had gone to the protest were being delighted about it all over social media and hungry for more. Having done none of his Institute work at all, and 96% sure that he would be fired within the week anyway, Prowl left at five.

-

That was Tuesday. On Friday, they published the papers.

Friday was a calculated choice. Activists tended to be less tied up with work and school and responsibilities on weekends, but government was nearly impossible to mobilize. Friday gave them a head start.

The news spread like crazy. _Local charity under fire for allegations of fraud_ was a Sunday headline.

On Monday, the City Council filed the lawsuit, with imminent risk to their careers if they didn’t.

It was done. And somehow, Prowl had managed to keep himself from being implicated.

He quit anyway, promptly, so that it would look like he’d done so in previously-ignorant disgust. He talked to his program advisor, who agreed to switch him to a research-based thesis track so that he could complete his master’s without the internship hours from the Institute. He was ignoring Bumblebee’s texts. Rodimus had texted him a star emoji with no comment whatsoever, which meant that Drift had probably figured out, to some extent, what he was up to. Prowl ignored that too.

Starscream was…staying with him, now. They hadn’t talked about it beyond Prowl’s offer that first night. The second night, Starscream had shown up with a backpack stuffed full of clothes, and that was that. Prowl went to his classes and spent what had formerly been his internship hours in the library to keep up some semblance of routine. Starscream went to his morning job at a convenience store and his night job at a restaurant, and Prowl only ever saw him for about an hour in the late evenings.

A month passed. The Institute was still in hot water, and Prowl still had a few tidbits to release if the energy levels ever got too low for his liking. Bumblebee had tattled to Optimus about Prowl’s “internship”, and now Prowl was ignoring both of them.

Prowl was reading an article about launching a career in consulting when Starscream walked in one evening in mid-February. “I thought you talked to Rodimus,” Starscream said, apropos of nothing, as he set his bag down. He pulled a bottle of wine out and walked towards the fridge.

“Why would I talk to Rodimus?” Prowl asked, not looking up from his screen.

“Because you’re both, you know.” Starscream waving his arms around in lieu of finishing the sentence was clear in his reflection on the monitor. “Part of Prime’s little gang of blundering wannabe do-gooders.”

 _Huh_. Prowl had always wondered exactly how the Decepticons had characterized Optimus and by extension the rest of them. Prowl knew that Optimus and Megatron had some kind of history, but both of them kept irritatingly quiet about it. Prowl’s instincts told him that he could push on this, guide the conversation towards Starscream telling him more about it, maybe even involve that bottle of wine.

Maybe he would. But there was a more pressing concern. “Why do you ask?”

“I saw him tonight. He and Drift were downtown with their classmates, they were walking by when I got out. I didn’t think they would want to talk to me, but it turned out Rodimus had news.”

“News?” Prowl probably would have heard whatever it was from Bumblebee - if he were speaking to Bumblebee.

“They’re applying for university grants to reopen Optimus’s place,” Starscream said. “Which isn’t a half-bad idea. I just don’t think it’s going to work. They’re, you know, them.”

“Maybe Optimus is backing him up?”

“I got the impression that Rodimus hasn’t told him,” Starscream said. “And Bumblebee disapproves. And that Drift wanted to tell us but Rodimus would rather go it alone.”

“Us, huh.” Prowl considered it. He hadn’t thought of himself and Starscream as any sort of unit, in anything. Even though Starscream was the only person who Prowl had told about the details of the Institute thing. Even though Bumblebee not knowing that Starscream was in Prowl’s life now was the reason he was avoiding contact, more so than Prowl not wanting to explain the Institute drama.

Starscream rolled his eyes. “You. He meant you. I was just a convenient messenger.”

“What do you want to do, then?” Prowl found himself asking. “Not Soundwave’s thing, not Rodimus’s thing.”

“I’m doing our thing,” Starscream said. “Eurgh. Your thing. I’m ready to pounce whichever way I need to whenever there’s an update on the suit. I’m in this til those bastards are drowning in debt and out of this city forever.”

“It’s our thing. It’s always been our thing. Without you, nothing would have ever happened.”

Starscream looked down, still standing between the kitchen and the living area. They hadn’t talked about the night of the heist – the night Starscream had moved in – at all. There were always other priorities. “You would have found a way,” Starscream said.

“Impossible to say for sure,” Prowl said. “What’s the wine for?”

Starscream rolled his eyes. He was too far away for Prowl to really see it, but he did it alongside an exaggerated jerk of his head to make sure that his audience could interpret it. “Drinking.”

“You don’t drink wine.”

“You don’t know.”

“I suppose not.”

Starscream didn’t seem to know what to say to that, so Prowl waited. He’d found that acquiescing to Starscream threw him off – made things more honest, and more interesting. He knew that it was a natural reaction to spending years with your primary confidante being someone who would never back down from his own platform, would never even really listen. Prowl tried not to think about it.

“It’s from my boss,” Starscream said, just as Prowl was settling in for what many would have considered to be an excruciatingly long silence. “It’s my birthday.”

“Oh,” Prowl said, not having expected that. Actually…he hadn’t expected anything. Of all people, Starscream was the one who was still sometimes a blank space. It wasn’t that Prowl couldn’t figure him out – couldn’t have come up with that possibility, if he’d seriously thought about it. The problem – was it a problem? – was that Prowl _let_ Starscream be an enigma. He wasn’t complicated, really – he wanted his movement to succeed, and glory for it, and second to that, safety and security. He distrusted Prowl enough to hide personal details on instinct because he didn’t trust anyone. As far as Prowl knew, he’d never had reason to.

But it wasn’t as fun to think about it as it was to tease the answers out of Starscream, to learn what it took, to see how he was warming up to Prowl by increments. A month ago, he likely wouldn’t have even gotten the wine out of his bag in front of Prowl and invited the question.

“Happy birthday,” Prowl said.

“Aren’t they all,” Starscream said, voice flat. He glanced back at the fridge. “Want to break it out? It’s good stuff. Do you even drink?”

Prowl nodded in response to both questions and Starscream turned on a heel to get the wine back out of the fridge. “I assume you have a corkscrew somewhere?”

“Above the fridge,” Prowl replied, shutting down the computer and rolling the chair over to the coffee table, then getting up to help Starscream navigate the kitchen. He got out mason jars to drink out of, which made Starscream chuckle.

Prowl could have figured out why. More interesting to cant his head to the side and examine Starscream, waiting on an explanation. Waiting to see if he’d get one. “Would’ve thought actual wine glasses were more your speed,” he said, pouring them each a glass.

“Jars are more versatile.”

“We always used these too.” That, Starscream didn’t offer details on. Prowl didn’t expect him to.

“So after the Institute crumbles to dust forever,” Prowl said, not having to specify to Starscream, of all people, that he was speaking hypothetically. “What are you doing next?”

Starscream slumped on the couch, feet on the coffee table, and Prowl took a seat back on his desk chair. “Can’t think about after if we don’t know that it’s going to happen.”

Prowl thought about that image of moving towards a cliff, certain that he was going to crash hard when he was flung off of it. It sounded like what Starscream was talking about. The concept of someone else seeing the future that way was oddly reassuring. It was easier to imagine Starscream living past May then himself, and if Starscream felt the same way as he did, then well, it was another angle to convince Prowl that it was as illogical as he had always known that it was. “You have to have made plans,” he said, because, well, it was Starscream. 

“Oh, I have plans,” he said. “Plans for staying here and trying to get the organization productive again. Plans for staying here and dedicating myself to driving Megatron out. Plans for going somewhere else, to do the work we could have done if we hadn’t destroyed ourselves.”

“You didn’t destroy yourselves,” Prowl said. It was just an objective truth. “Soundwave’s working on something, Drift’s apparently working on something, you’re working on something.”

“How do you know about Soundwave’s – ugh. Never mind.” Starscream stopped for a moment, sipping his wine. “Ugh. We destroyed ourselves. I’m arguing for his side. He was right.”

“Who?” Prowl knew the answer.

“Megatron –” Starscream broke off into a laugh, and Prowl started to regret asking, started to regret letting them get on this topic at all. “When he came back, he expected to find everything as he’d left it. I’d wanted the same thing, which he still doesn’t believe. I tried. I really tried.”

“I believe you,” Prowl cut in, just because it felt like he should say it.

Starscream looked at him appraisingly and continued. Good. Prowl wouldn’t have wanted him to read that as some kind of tactic to shift Starscream away from what he’d been about to say. He’d just wanted Starscream to know. “You’re probably the person who most gets what it was like, outside of the Decepticons ourselves. People saw their leader – who they’d followed for years, who some of them had left their homes for, who many of them had absorbed beliefs from, who’d worked and sacrificed and changed for him – they saw him fall. They saw that he was fallible. They saw that the face of the cause was fallible. They saw that _they_ were fallible.” Starscream stared into the depths of his glass. “Everyone says it was my fault. I know why. But he made choices that day too.”

Prowl nodded, sensing that it wasn’t the time to argue, and not having anything to say anyway.

“When he came back, he found out that the couple of actions I’d tried while he was gone were failures. He found out that members had sloughed off by the dozens. When Drift left, the regular members, the ones who just showed up to the actions, who didn’t dedicate their whole lives to it, all seemed to realize at once that it was a lost cause. It was a fucking exodus. When Megatron came back, he heard all that, and decided that the Decepticons were dead, and that I’d killed them.” Starscream’s grip on his wine was tight enough that his hand was trembling a little. Prowl couldn’t tell if it was in anger or something else. “He was right.”

“Half-right, from what you just said.”

“What do you think?” Starscream asked, suddenly meeting Prowl’s eyes. “You know what happened. I’m sure you were reporting all of it to Optimus so he could gloat. Whose fault do you think it all was?”

“I think it was a mess,” Prowl said. He spoke honestly – Starscream didn’t seem to have an agenda here other than find out what Prowl thought, and Prowl – Prowl wanted to tell him, wanted to be able to speak and be listened to, more than he wanted to leverage this situation for himself. “It was Megatron’s fault in that if he was removed from the equation, it never would have happened. It’s your fault in that if you were removed from the equation, it wouldn’t have happened precisely like it did. I find assigning guilt to be tiresome. Any energy spent ruminating on the past can be better spent reacting to it and acting based on it.”

There was a slight smile on the edges of Starscream’s lips. Prowl had never seen him smile quite like that before. Smile to amplify the humor or irony of a situation, sure. Smile to make people uncomfortable because it was an inappropriate reaction to whatever topic was being discussed, yes. But not smiling like this, looking down at his wine glass as if he wasn’t doing it performatively for Prowl’s benefit. “Fair point. Anyway, the point of all this is that the Decepticons are well and truly dead. So I guess I could be like Drift and pretend I never was one, or be like Soundwave and pretend that the word means something that it hasn’t for a long time, or.” He paused a moment. “Well, I’m sure there are other options. Good ones. This is a new way of thinking.”

Prowl could have told him that he was thinking along similar lines about the future, but he wasn’t sure that Starscream wouldn’t laugh in his face at it.

Starscream didn’t give him a chance to speak. “At least we’ve got our thing, for now,” he said. He looked down at his empty glass. “I need more wine.”

Prowl finished the last sip of his own.

Starscream poured the rest of the wine between their jars and raised his. “To keeping those fuckers down,” he said. Prowl raised his own glass and tapped it.

“There’s a couple reasons why you could be doing this,” Starscream said, after they both drank. “Letting me stay. You could want someone in your corner to tell people you’re not an asshole in your personal life, and you picked me because you could stand my presence. Or because I was convenient. Or you could want something else.”

If Prowl were a different sort of person _,_ he would probably reassure Starscream _I don’t want anything from you_. But there was no use telling a lie that blatant to the one person who it usually didn’t hurt to be honest with.

Starscream didn’t give him much time to react. “You invited me to stay after having something like an hour to think about it,” he said. He slid to the corner of the couch where he would be closest to Prowl. “That couldn’t have been the cold Prowl-patented logical choice.”

“You might be surprised,” Prowl said.

“Are you attracted to anyone?” Starscream asked. His voice was low and silky, his posture open towards Prowl. The body language made the words feel like less of a departure from the previous conversation than they otherwise would have.

“Yes,” Prowl said. “Men, generally.”

Starscream nodded. “I find you attractive.”

Was he – were they really doing this?

Prowl supposed that it was his choice. Starscream had given him a proposition, and Prowl…Prowl badly wanted to take him up on it.

It was a bad idea for a plethora of reasons. First, Starscream was a volatile element who had a key to Prowl’s home. Anything Prowl did to complicate _that_ situation ran the risk of it blowing up in his face.

Second, Starscream’s motivation for asking could be one of a number of things with a variety of implications: he could be asking because he wanted to, he could be asking because he thought that he owed Prowl for the hospitality, he could be asking because he wanted something from Prowl and thought that making their personal entanglement messier would help him get it. And he could be asking because he was directionless and scared of ever being alone – Prowl had been there, done that, and had no desire to have it play out again.

The potential adverse outcomes were minor. If Starscream was trying to betray Prowl somehow, what would he even do? They’d been working toward the same goals, vaguely at first, and directly more recently, for their entire acquaintanceship. What would be the point? No, the only likely things to come of this were hurt feelings, confusion, and a messy end to their – friendship didn’t feel like the right word, but whatever it was they were doing.

It wasn’t an insurmountable adverse outcome. And the positive outcome would be that Prowl got to have sex with Starscream. Saying yes was tempting, with those odds.

Prowl was about to say it. And then he considered an element he’d nearly forgotten: Starscream.

Starscream would have his own outcomes from this. And those outcomes, if this was just a way to prove to himself that he could move on from his abusive ex, or if he was seeing it as some kind of payment for Prowl letting him stay, were worse than the potential negative outcomes on Prowl’s side.

He had to say no. He had to say no until those factors were gone from the equation. Not for him, and not for the betterment of the world. For Starscream. It was a brand-new kind of decision-making, a kind that he was just realizing he had started doing the night Starscream had stolen the papers and that he'd done every day since. 

“I find you attractive as well,” Prowl said. “But I’m not doing this. Not right now, when you don’t have a safe place to go.”

“Well,” Starscream said, sliding back to a more comfortable distance away on the couch and taking another sip of wine. “Sounds like I’ll have to get that dealt with.”

-

Rodimus grasped the silver key with the rounder head, letting the rest fall away as he approached the familiar single door. It could have been any typical spring morning a year ago, walking into work.

But it was nothing like it at all. Rodimus was, somehow, running things now.

“You still have a key?” Drift’s voice was just barely canted toward teasing.

“Nobody ever asked for it back,” said Rodimus. He stepped up the the door and allowed himself one moment to pine for the old days, for the days when he could expect to open the door and see Optimus and his seemingly infinite wisdom inside. Then he took a breath and unlocked the door.

The space looked the same as Rodimus had left it. When the Institute had bought out the Center, Optimus had had Rodimus, Bee, and Prowl put all of the paperwork and sensitive materials and some of the more expensive equipment – computers, printers – in a storage locker, but everything else had stayed. Here were Cybertron Community Center’s tables, and chairs, and coffee pot, and refrigerator, and ugly wallpaper. Here was the place where Rodimus had first gotten the sense that one day, he might achieve something.

“You want the spare office supplies anywhere in particular?” Drift asked. He was carrying in the first box of corporate donations. The inscription on the side said that it was filled entirely with pens. _Why did someone think they needed that many pens? Nobody needed that many pens_.

“Uh.” Decisions?!?  _Why had they set this up so that he would be making decisions_? 

“We can get everything unloaded, then you can give me a tour, then we can decide?”

“Yeah? Yeah. That sounds good.”

There was a jingle at the bell on the door and Rodimus turned toward it to see Bumblebee walk in. “I shut the door to your trunk,” he said. “You’re welcome.”

“If someone wants to steal a box with twelve reams of paper in it, they need it more than we do,” Rodimus said. “Plus, watching them run down the street with it would be hilarious.”

“Prowl texted me while I was at the office this morning,” Bumblebee continued. “I’ll read you the whole text: _Cybertron, question mark_. It’s been _months_.”

“Did you reply?” Rodimus asked. Drift reached down to take Rodimus’s car keys out of his hand and then walked back outside, presumably to grab another round of boxes.

“Yeah. I figure he was right to be pissed that I told Optimus what he was up to, even though I still think it was a dumbass move,” Bumblebee said. He shrugged. “I just hope it’s all behind us now. I invited him to help set up, if that’s okay.”

“Sure,” Rodimus said, not believing for a moment that Prowl would come help. He could imagine Prowl’s reaction to the concept of Rodimus running Cybertron – renamed Lost Light – himself: five minutes of uninterrupted laughter.

“I still don’t know how he found out,” Bumblebee said. “Maybe he overheard one of the professors talking about it? I know Trion was pretty excited about you doing this.”

“Nah, it was probably Starscream,” Rodimus said, pulling open a closet door to see if it could reasonably be used as office supply storage. There was a shelf at the top that was _probably_ sturdy enough. 

“ _What_?”

The incredulity in Bumblebee’s voice was intense enough that Rodimus had to pause and think over what he’d just said. “Drift and I ran into Starscream last week. He asked how things were. This is the only thing I have had any mental capacity to think about for the past month, so I told him.”

“Drift still talks to Starscream?” Bumblebee’s voice was probing.

“No? Not that I know of. I said hi first, I guess.”

“ _You_ know Starscream? Wait, _Prowl_ knows Starscream?”

“Um.” Rodimus and Drift had never really talked about the long and strange night that they’d had in January after Prowl had called asking about Starscream. And…if that was when Prowl had stopped speaking to Bumblebee, it made sense that nobody had told him.

Drift walked back in with a box, gave Rodimus a searching glance, and left again in the time it took for Rodimus to come up with a response. “It’s probably better if you ask Prowl.” Rodimus still didn’t know why Prowl had been in contact with Starscream in the first place and…he kind of didn’t want to.

Drift walked in with another box, followed by Prowl who was carrying one too. Drift walked back out immediately, but Prowl lingered. Rodimus’s pocket vibrated with a text.

 _Getting coffee for as long as it takes you to hash this out_. Rodimus sent a thumbs up in response.

“Since when are you friends with Starscream?” Bumblebee asked after Prowl had set his box on the table next to the others.

“Since when are you a person I can trust with potentially sensitive information?”

“Optimus would have found out somehow.”

“ _That’s_ your excuse?”

“You want an excuse? I was _worried_ , Prowl. I was worried that you were in over your head and that even if Optimus was in on it, he didn’t know how much you were sacrificing. _Excuse me_ for trying to be a good friend.”

“I know.” Prowl’s words were…surprisingly nonconfrontational. “I’m still bothered that you didn’t trust me.”

“I trust you on lots of counts, Prowl. I trust you to want to do good, to be a good friend, and to find the best solutions to really difficult problems. I _don’t_ trust you to take care of yourself. You’ve never given me a reason to.”

Rodimus was gearing up to think of an excuse to take a cue from Drift and leave when Bumblebee gestured to him. “The three of us still care about Optimus’s mission, right? But Optimus is gone. I…refused to accept that. I assumed you were working with him on the Institute thing, Prowl, and I never should have. He’s gone, we’re doing our best on our own, and we need to look out for each other,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” Prowl said.

“If you’re worried about getting a job, we could probably pay you at least for the summer,” Rodimus said. “I don’t know what happens after that. Depends on funding.”

“I appreciate the offer,” Prowl said – maybe sarcastically? Rodimus couldn’t tell. “But I’m working on something else.”

“Who would be running Lost Light after the summer?” Bumblebee asked.

“I would,” Rodimus said. “If we get seed funding, I’m dropping out of the program.”

Bumblebee made a face like he was about to argue, then he glanced at Prowl, who looked unfazed. “I guess we all need to play to our strengths,” he finally said.

“Well, right now we all need to unload boxes,” Rodimus said, pulling out his phone to reply to Drift.

 _All good_.

-

 _Administrative Assistant to State’s Attorney General_.

Starscream tapped randomly at the keyboard as he stared at the job posting. The details of the position sounded great but – a _ssistant_.

It would maneuver him into a position where he’d get to meet policy makers and make connections and maybe even the start of something that could last a long time. But only if he was willing to be someone’s _assistant_.

Keys at the door. Prowl walked in a few seconds later, kicking his shoes off and nudging them into their proper place on the mat. “You’re home early,” Prowl observed.

It was 7 PM on a Friday. Starscream didn’t think he’d had a Friday night off in all the time he’d been staying with Prowl – he’d asked for tonight off to meet an old friend for coffee to see about becoming housemates. It seemed tenable from their conversation – all of the original Decepticons seemed to have held grudges against Starscream at one point of another, with varyingly justified reasoning, but Thundercracker seemed to mostly be over it. He was working as a security guard at a college dorm, and writing what Starscream expected were extraordinarily terrible screenplays on the side. He seemed to have calmed down in a way that Megatron and Soundwave and Drift and, well, Starscream himself never had, and he seemed like he wouldn’t be horrible to live with. Besides, with Thundercracker mostly working nights, they would probably never see each other anyway.

Especially if Starscream snagged the job on the posting that his eyes had glazed over looking at.

“I’m moving into a new place on the first,” Starscream said. It had been almost a month since he’d moved onto Prowl’s couch, and even though it was infinitely better than before, Starscream was getting tired of it, and he suspected that the diminished access to privacy was starting to grate on Prowl too. “I took tonight off to settle the details.”

“Oh,” Prowl said. His voice could have come from a computer, there was so little to read in it. He glanced over at the monitor behind Starscream. “Anything interesting in the news today? I’ve been in the library.”

“I’m not looking at the news,” Starscream said. He wouldn’t have told Prowl, except…well, he wouldn’t have told anyone else. Prowl offered a perspective that Starscream couldn’t always entirely predict. Prowl was the first person who Starscream had met who, when Starscream needed help, could _help_.

Prowl cocked his head to the side, the closest he would ever come to asking permission to walk over. Starscream waved him closer and watched as Prowl scanned the posting.

“Are you going to apply?” he asked when he finished.

Starscream didn’t respond, and Prowl looked like he was scanning the posting again.

“What’s the problem?”

“I promised that I would never allow myself to be under anyone’s control like that ever again.”

Prowl visibly recoiled from the screen and from Starscream. Starscream gave him a scathing look, because it really _did_ sting a little, for all that the reaction was probably just Prowl being uncomfortable with the topic.

“That’s the dilemma. Everything else is positives.”

“It wouldn’t be _like that_ ,” Prowl said.

Starscream rolled his eyes. “I _know_.”

“I don’t think you do,” Prowl said, backing away and setting his backpack down against the desk. He unzipped it and pulled out the tupperwares he always used for lunch, stood, and carried them to the kitchen. “I was always an outsider to the Decepticons,” Prowl said. “But even from the outside, it was clear that the organization meant more to you all than anything. It was your whole lives, your whole identities. The idea of keeping anything separate, having anything left after you devoted what you could to the fight, would have been abhorrent. Am I on the right track?”

“You know you are.” Starscream hoped the resentment he was feeling came through in his voice.

“That’s what I mean. Everything that happened between you and Megatron happened in the context of that mindset. That’s not what this position is. It’s not a cause, it’s a job.” Prowl was standing with his hands folded together on the counter, talking to Starscream from halfway across the apartment. “If you don’t like it, you can quit.”

Starscream fought the urge to laugh, and them stopped fighting it and let himself. Of course he could quit. Of course he could rely on Prowl to see through his blind spots and tell him things that were so obvious but that he somehow hadn’t figured out himself. “I suppose I’ll send in a resume,” he said. He knew he was a tad infamous from his activism work, so whether or not he was a good candidate for the position depended heavily on the opinions of whoever looked over the applications.

But he could apply. If he was offered the job, he could turn it down. He could quit. Sometimes, things really were that simple.

-

“The Internet is out.”

Rodimus whirled to face Drift, who was sitting at the front desk at the newly-reopened Lost Light Crisis Assistance Center. “You’re kidding me.”

Drift sighed. “I wish,” he said. “I can call the company. Glad we got here early.” He stood up from the desk and got out his cell phone.

There was a chime from the door and Rodimus whipped back around toward the door and the spring rain that pelted steadily down outside. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone coming in for another hour! They hadn’t put snacks out yet and they couldn’t even open up the resource database because _the Internet was out_.

Rodimus, in the moment before he laid eyes on the person at the door, wouldn’t have been able to imagine how the situation could get worse. Then he recognized Megatron.

He shook his head. He could hear Drift’s voice from the back hallway, on the phone with the Internet company. Rodimus kept his voice low so that Drift wouldn’t come check on him. “Get. Out.”

“I’ll leave if you still want me to, after I’ve said what I came to say,” Megatron said. “I’ve spent the past months thinking. Reflecting. Re-examining my priorities. And I’ve come to realize that something like this, what you’re doing here, is the sort of thing I want to be a part of at this juncture. We’ve had our disagreements–”

“Do you _even_ know who I am?” Rodimus asked, still trying to keep his voice down, though Drift had most likely been able to hear Megatron.

“Of course I do, Rodimus,” Megatron said. “Optimus and I were in contact for the first year you worked for him.”

Rodimus…isn’t touching that. He knew Optimus hated Megatron, but had never thought about them ever actually talking to each other. They must have talked, though. Nobody was _that_ angry at someone who by and large wanted the same things as they did without some personal reason.

“My point is that I’d like to work with you, in whatever capacity you’ll have me. I think this place has the potential to do a lot of good, and I have a history and perspective that you might find helpful. That’s what I came here to say. Now you’re welcome to tell me to leave.” Megatron inclined his head past Rodimus, and Rodimus followed his gaze to see Drift standing at the back of the room, arms crossed.

“Don’t move,” Rodimus said, and motioned with his head for Drift to follow him into the back hall.

“What. The. Fuck,” Rodimus began, so out of his depth that he was still working on comprehending the conversation.

“He’s right,” Drift said, hands shoved in his pockets. “I’d love to say that we’ll be great at this and we super definitely know what we’re doing, but like.” He shrugged. Rodimus got it.

“We don’t _need_ him,” Rodimus said. “We planned all this ourselves, we got it all set up ourselves, and we can do it ourselves.”

“He has ways of spreading information and drawing people in and making sure word gets where it needs to go that neither of us come close to,” Drift said. Rodimus was about to protest when Drift cut him off. “We don’t need him. But we could use him.”

“What if this is some complicated plot to get revenge on Optimus by corrupting me?”

Drift blinked once, twice. “What?”

Okay, that possibility sounded sillier out loud. “Would you be okay with it?” Rodimus asked.

Drift took a moment to think. “When Megatron acts, he’s never been anything but completely sincere. If he’s asking, it’s really what he wants,” he started. “I’ve only seen him change his mind for the worse before. But this time…I think this could be good for him and for Lost Light.”

“What about for you?” Rodimus asked.

“It’d be _awkward_ , but I could deal with it.” Drift looked keenly at Rodimus. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Working with Megatron, in Optimus’s space?”

“Optimus needs to accept that I can make my own decisions.”

Drift nodded. “So what do you think?”

Rodimus was about to say yes – it was clear that Drift expected him to – but what he blurted out was “I can’t do it.”

“Can’t?”

“I can’t work with him. Not after what he’s done.”

Drift looked away from Rodimus, lips pressed tightly together. “You don’t think people can change?”

“Of course people can change,” Rodimus said. “But I’d rather he did it somewhere far away from here.”

Drift managed a small smile at that. “I suppose that is an option. It isn’t all or nothing.”

“I know he’s important to you,” Rodimus said.

“ _Was_.”

“Was important to you. But he hurt you too. Not in the same way, as far as I know, but…you don’t need to forgive him for either of you to move on.”

Drift nodded, thoughtful. “Okay. We can do this ourselves.”

Drift took Rodimus’s hand and led him back to the lobby.

-

Starscream, true to his word, vanished on the first of the month.

Prowl came home that night to his empty apartment, and it felt as if the emptiness had physical presence. He ignored it, worked on the website he was building for his business on his now-freed couch on his laptop, and went to bed.

The next month sailed by in a haze of thesis deadlines, coursework, planning for the future, and helping Rodimus with his _abysmal_ financial management at Lost Light. Every time Rodimus irritated him, or he wanted to complain about the struggles of starting a business (which he didn’t dare do in front of Bumblebee, for fear of the _you brought this on yourself_ that Bee would be completely justified in saying), he fought off the urge to text Starscream. They didn’t text anymore. The only texts between them for the past few months were things like _Brought in a package_ from Starscream’s end and _I’ll be home around midnight, sorry if I wake you_ from Prowl’s. They’d _talked_ in person. Going back to the colorful and interesting conversations they’d once had over text was less than appealing now, but Prowl also didn’t dare ask Starscream to meet up. He was busy. They were both busy. And if Starscream never wanted to see or speak to Prowl again…well, Prowl would rather find out gradually, with a smaller and smaller bit of hope leaking out of him every day that Starscream didn’t text him first.

Then, one day, just after Prowl had stopped expecting him to, he texted.

 _I got the job_. 

Prowl had never put Starscream’s name in his phone contacts, he realized. He was still texting, according to Prowl’s phone, as _Citizen_. Prowl rectified that, then went to stare at the contents of the text until he thought of the perfect reply.

 _Sounds like a cause for celebration_.

It wasn’t what people said when they were asking other people out on dates, but Starscream would know that Prowl would never phrase something so ambiguously to anyone else. Starscream could take it however he wanted.

Starscream texted him the name of a bar downtown, and _tonight_? Prowl grinned at the screen, like he’d once done most nights in the quiet of his apartment, where he’d once always expected to be alone.

 _I’ll be there_. 

Prowl’s phone vibrated with a news story while he was on the bus downtown. He opened it automatically and had to read the headline twice to absorb what it said.

Any nervousness he had held about meeting up with Starscream evaporated. He counted down the stops until the bus reached the correct one, walked too quickly, too eagerly toward the correct bar.

Starscream had beaten him there, which was probably obnoxiously deliberate. Prowl suspected that he tried to be earlier than people who tried to get places early, and later than those who tended to get places late. Maybe it would get annoying. But right now it was just convenient.

Prowl shoved his phone in Starscream’s face without any greeting or warning. “ _We won_.”

Starscream took the phone out of his hands to hold it a little further back from his face, and once it was out of Prowl’s hands, he was appalled that he’d _let him_. But Starscream just scrolled through the story on the news app. _Charity Under Fire for Financial Mismanagement Loses Lawsuit_. Starscream’s eyebrows lifted higher and higher as he read, until he handed back the phone and broke into a smile.

“They’re dead,” he said. “I can’t believe that actually worked.”

Prowl rolled his eyes. “ _I_ knew that it would work.”

“Sure you did,” Starscream said.

Prowl really had, but he mimicked Starscream’s smile, content to let him believe whatever he wanted. All that mattered was _results_ , and those, they had.

“We’ve got a lot to celebrate, then,” Starscream said, stepping closer. He would have been uncomfortably close, if he was anyone but Starscream. Starscream, who Prowl had had such incredible conversations with before he’d even met, who Prowl had seen early in the morning and late at night, with his hair a mess and his guard as lowered as it ever got.

Prowl stepped even closer. Their chests were almost touching.

Starscream put his hand on Prowl’s jawline and pulled him in, a moment before Prowl would have done the same himself. Prowl had kissed people before but – not in a long time, and not quite like this, with the double victories of today still buzzing through him, not with the hard certainty that together, they’d achieved something, that both of them deserved this. That Prowl was part of a unit, part of something that was better together.

“Let’s definitely get some very nice drinks,” Starscream said, just a breath of speech in Prowl’s ear, as he pulled away.

“And then?” Prowl asked, matching his pitch.

Starscream smiled, and Prowl felt it as much as he saw it. “Like I said – I have plans.”

**Author's Note:**

> The “Canon-Typical Violence” tag refers to violence of the Megatron hurting Starscream variety; it occurs mostly but not entirely offscreen and is referenced in varying amounts of detail in several places. The only on-screen real-time violence takes place during the scene that starts with "113 Fourth Street was about what Prowl expected." 
> 
> If you're worried about not being able to engage with some of this but you still want to read, say, the Rodimus sections of the fic, or there’s some particular component that bothers you and you would like to read the fic with it edited out, message me on tumblr and I’ll see about getting you a safe version. 
> 
> If there is anything I should have warned for that I missed, please let me know in the comments!


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